Hardware for the Detector Control System of the ALICE TRD

The presented DCS single board computer represents the front-end of the detector control system of several detectors in Alice including TRD and TPC. The device is equipped with Alteras’s Excalibur FPGA, comprising of both a 100 k gate FPGA and an embedded ARM processor on which the operating system Linux is running. The FPGA is used to customize the device for different front-end environments. Communication with the board is based on Ethernet which is modified in order to operate in magnetic fields. Since the board has to operate under radiation conditions special care has been taken during the design process to ensure high reliability.